Ivan Knight and the Imaginary Friends

Ivan Knight and the Imaginary Friends is a rock project lead by vocalist Ivan Knight. This project is known for being one of the first Flex Entertainment rock groups.

Overview
Ivan Knight and the Imaginary Friends is a musical project lead by singer and producer, Ivan Knight. In this project, Ivan plays around with storytelling and world building through songwriting, while also collaborating with other artists and finding ways to work in those collaborations with the world that he has established.

Ivan was signed with Flex Entertainment less than 24 hours after his debut album came out. Being an album produced by Ivan before signing with Flex,

the album has a more serious tone as well as a more rock oriented sound. The album features no guest vocalists. Now signed to Flex, Ivan has started work on a new album with a more upbeat tone, and plans to collaborate with other artists as he expands his character library outside of his current protagonist of "The Frog".

Ivan contributed to two songs on the label's third compilation album Flex Gang, Vol. 3: "Big Baller B Stole My Girlfriend" featuring Big Baller B and uncredited appearances from WT and Depp Gibbs, and "Covered in Blood" with Lil Squeaky. Both songs went on to be two of the most popular songs from the album, with "Big Baller B Stole My Girlfriend" infamously receiving a brief reaction from famed music reviewer Anthony Fantano, and "Covered in Blood" becoming one of the most highly praised songs on the album, with famed Flex artist CRZFawkz calling it "maybe the best Flex song of all time" and named it his song of the year so far.

The Frog
Before Ivan formed the imaginary friends, he always liked to come up with characters (some of which he plans to explore and impersonate in future projects). When writing the first album however, Ivan had just come out of a terrible writer's block and was struggling at first to come up with a central character with their own backstory. Ivan decided to focus on coming up with an image, and after watching an old home VHS of him and his family at a Skydiving event back in 2001, he witnessed his older brother (who has four at the time) look into the camera and say "Frogs Rock!". While Ivan didn't understand the reference, that phrase stuck with him and he decided that painting his face in green paint to make him appear like a frog or an animal was a brilliant idea. Ivan felt that by covering the most expressive part of his face, he could remove himself from the music and anyone who listened to it could step in his place.

In a 2020 interview with Flex Magazine, Ivan discussed the labels his music received based on his image: "I'm so fucking tired of people labelling an artist's sound based around what they look like or what their orientation is. Like, 'female fronted' or 'black fronted' or 'LGBT' they aren't genres! Executives don't care about that. My music is not 'autistic, androgynous, Buddhist rap' it's goddamn Frog Rock! You can be black, white, old, young, man, woman, straight, gay, you're still welcome to enjoy my music. I guess I wanted to make a statement with that whole green face thing. No one is focusing on the fact that I'm a man, or that I'm white, or that I'm a Buddhist, they thinking about all the paint that's on my mug!".

Within the lore of the first two albums (which are meant to be seen as a two part story) Frogg dies between both albums, resulting in the latter album "Moving Forward" to have a different sound. During the production of the album however, Frogg was resurrected by an ancient god Xayacatyl, who agrees to leave the body of Frogg once he has finished the album, resulting not only in the titular song, but the album having a cathartic tone to it as Frogg is finishing the album to finish off the monster inside of him.

Albums

 * Ivan Knight and the Imaginary Friends (2020)
 * Moving Forward (2021)

EPs

 * My World (2020)
 * The King (2020)